Mesa Verde Region Towers: A View from Above

This study tests a hypothesis for the function of Pueblo III period Mesa Verde Region towers: that their construction and use enabled visual monitoring of the use of valuable resources. Geographic Information System (GIS) procedures and aerial photo interpretation are combined to develop and analyze two catchment types: 1) arbitrary 1-km-radius catchments and 2) 1-km-viewshed catchments, each type associated with both an equal sample of prehistoric tower sites and of randomly selected points. Discriminant analyses are used to determine which landscape attributes are most useful in distinguishing the catchment types. The analyses indicate that the tower viewsheds are distinguished from other catchment types by overrepresentation of those areas best suited for dry farming. This suggests that the prehistoric towers of the northern San Juan region of the U.S. Southwest were built to overlook the most valuable farmlands. Therefore, anyone entering such areas would see the towers and realize that someone considered the resources there important enough to potentially guard. The tower structures apparently served as markers of land tenure for the corporate groups who constructed them.